As is well known, utility industries (such as gas and water utilities) typically install a meter to indicate consumption of the relevant commodity by a particular customer. The consumption indicated by the meter forms the basis of the bill sent to the customer each month (or over another predetermined period of time). To read consumption from the meter, the utility industries have often utilized personnel whose job has been to physically inspect meters at each customer location. In order to reduce the need for meter-reading personnel to inspect every meter, many utilities have begun using various automatic meter reading (AMR) and remote meter reading (RMR) systems. These systems simplify the meter-reading process, by reading usage information from the individual meters through data transmissions. Toward this end, a meter typically includes a meter interface unit (MIU) that controls transmission of usage information read from the meter. At a predetermined scheduled time or upon receipt of an electronic request, the MIU will send the usage information, typically using one of three proprietary codecs, to the utility in the utility's desired format.
Utility flow meter operation must be reliable and accurate for appropriate utility monitoring and billing. Regarding accuracy, an important component of a utility flow meter is its encoder that translates the meter's behavior into the transmittable consumption reading sent by the MIU on which a utility customer's bill is based. As such, in the development and design of utility flow meters, encoder accuracy is an important factor.
Utilities either actually or constructively own flow meters, meaning that even when a customer has paid for the meter, such as a water meter, the meter is still effectively owned and controlled by the utility. While utilities have access to the data and information collected by it, other interested parties generally do not. Thus, for example, a facility may not have access to the granular data they would like to have, even though the utility does have access to such data. However, meter owners (i.e., utilities) have been reluctant to allow others to intervene with or splice into their data capture operations in view of the importance of accuracy discussed above.